Change or Die (StormWatch, Vol. 3)

Good book to read

This one concludes the big story arc, which pits the United Nations' superhero team (admittedly run by one man at the time) against a shadowy group of superhumans who want to change the world and free people from all their problems and concerns. It's got a lot of neat ideas, good dialogue, and great art. This is really thought-provoking work...highly highly recommended.

The Change or Die story is the best story to come out of Stormwatch by this point! Quite the masterpiece of using Superheroes to tell a story! Surely will be very memorable for any read versed in superhero media or not! The remaining stories are fun, although convoluted. Good showcase of the characters and interesting direction.

I've picked these up to get my background continuity to start The Authority. The Stormwatch stuff is DECENT, and I mean DECENT. I'm hoping for better around the time The Authority starts up. BEWARE, tho! Ellis is, at least in Stormwatch, VERY Anti-American. The work borders on anti-American agit-prop. To read it during the Obama administration is quite interesting, because Obama has to make Ellis's mouth water -- all the while the country is going to hell. So maybe Ellis made a deal with the devil, I don't know!

In StormWatch: Change Or Die, the third collection of Warren Ellis work on StormWatch, bad things happen. Worse than even Jenny Sparks has seen before. If you were thinking Henry Bendix (Chief Officer or "Weatherman" for the organization) was a little too tightly wound before now, you ain't seen nothing yet. The member nations of the U.N. were already worried about him, but now the team members are as well. He's sent them to stop a renegade super-powered group that's threatening to...make the world a better place. I can't really tell you more about it than that without giving away the biggest thrills in the storyline. But I can say that this collection delivers on everything Ellis has been building up to as he's been systematically tearing down everything that this series used to symbolize. Meaningfully, he finally shifts over to multi-issue stories, leaving the book's traditional single-issue adventure format in his dust. And the art finally measures up to the demands of the writing for what turns out to be Tom Raney's swan song on the series. It's a different world from here on out...

The entire contents of this book (and then some) are in StormWatch Vol 2 so unless I'm missing something this is a waste of money

One of the strongest trends within superhero stories over the last 20 years has been the superhero with too much power...Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, and Kingdom Come all mined that territory. With all that power, should a superhero or group of superheroes have the right to make decisions for the rest of the world? What Ellis has done in Change or Die is make it feel a lot closer to our own reality. Rather than setting it in the future or an alternate universe, he has set Change or Die in the mainstream continuity of a major superhero universe, using characters and storylines that had been introduced over the previous few years. Also, by using Stormwatch, a UN sponsored superteam, he draws effective analogies to real life, raising the issue of superpower politics and ethics. The biggest problem with this collection is that it doesn't have the whole story, though. Warren came on to Stormwatch with issue #37, and this trade collects #48-50 of Volume I and #1-3 of Volume II. The entire arc building up to Change Or Die started the moment Warren began writing the book, and without the hints and suggestions layered throughout his run, you can't get quite as good an appreciation for what he's doing. Still, this was my favorite comic story of the late '90s, hands down.

Since its inception, "Stormwatch" was the bastardchild of the Wildstorm universe. The stories were boring and thecharacters lacked any sort of depth. That was until Warren Ellis came along. In his 13-issue run, he gave the United Nations superteam a heavy dose of reality where no one can be trusted and everyone is to be feared. This is a must for fans of the Stormwatch spinoff "The Authority" as well as anyone who appreciates a good read.